


Letting Go

by illwynd



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Canonical Character Death, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 13:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18447806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: Thor doesn't remember letting go.





	Letting Go

**Author's Note:**

> Gosh, it's been a while since I've posted anything, and this is probably a mean one to post, but I wrote it a year ago and shoved it in a box and now I want to get it out before Endgame.
> 
> It is set in the middle of Infinity War, so you already know what the character death tag is there for. 
> 
> Also, it is to be noted that this was originally Schaudwen's idea, and boy is it a painful one. <3

Thor wakes again and again from dreams of letting go, and the worst part is that when he wakes, he knows he does not truly remember.

It had been all he could do, all he had strength for—crawling over rubble with the throbbing pain in his skull scattering and dulling his thoughts—but all he needed to do was reach him. Thor had only that one goal, that one aim. If he could reach him, somehow that would be enough.

Moments later, he had breathed out as the wave of fire blazed across them, the pressure and the silent roar, the pinpricks against his skin as they were hurled out into the emptiness.

In the dark, in the cold, Thor held his brother’s dead body close, and he squeezed his own eyes shut as the ice crept across his skin.

It would take some time for Thor to join his brother where he had gone, but eventually he would follow. Even he would perish at last in the frozen, airless dark. And space was vast. The dying calls of the final refugees of Asgard were even then fading out across the great distances, unheard, unnoted. Perhaps one day some ship might stumble across this field of glittering debris. Discover the broken bodies, dry and cold, among the metal fragments. Wonder who they had been and what had befallen them.

They would find Thor’s corpse clinging tight to his brother still. He was certain of that. That certainty had filled him as the tears leaked from his eyes and froze.

And now Thor wakes each night from terrible dreams.

Once, on their mission, he could not stop himself from asking Rocket if, truly, they had found him alone. If truly there was no other form beside him.

“The other would have been dead already… I would understand it if you said you had cast him aside, that place was the grave of so many…”

Thor heard his voice straining, low, with hope that he already knew had failed.

Dark glistening eyes, usually shrewd, gazed back at him with pity, and Thor shook his head.

“You don’t need to answer that. Forgive me.”

The small creature patted his arm anyway and turned aside, letting Thor quietly wipe his tears.

He had let go. Some moment had come, and he does not even remember it. Unconsciousness had taken him, and his grip had slackened—he does not remember but he sees it each night in his dreams. Feels the cold and the exhaustion and his mind drifting. He holds his brother’s corpse against his chest and then he blinks and he does not.

Thor wakes from these dreams with his heart pounding, quaking his entire form.

They had found him alone, his brother’s body lost somewhere out in the darkness, and Thor does not even remember.

He had never meant to surrender. It had merely happened, and there is no going back now to undo it.

There is no undoing anything that happened between them. None of his own actions, things that seemed so sensible at the time.

So Thor chases Thanos, chases vengeance, because he fears the silence that falls whenever he stops, and he dreads the memories that fill it.

Years ago his nightmares were filled with the sight of Loki’s grip loosening from Gungnir’s hilt. Thor remembers his brother falling away into the void, dying before his eyes, while he could do nothing to stop it. He remembers watching Loki choose to die, leaving him with nothing more than questions and doubts. He lived that moment again in his dreams a thousand times, and whenever he woke from one he would have sworn there could be no greater misery.

He finds it is worse to be woken to his own fists clenching in spasms, grasping at nothing, at a still shape drifted too far away because he let it happen, the hands that had betrayed him this time his own.

And this time there are no questions to ask, no doubts to untangle. Just Loki’s promise to him, empty as the void. A vow that could never come true, and Thor knows it was meant to comfort, meant to soothe.

Just the memory of the panic in Loki’s voice, crying out for the hand at Thor’s brow to stop. His brother breaking in moments at the sound of Thor’s screams.

Just the sight of the knife in Loki’s hand and the glint in his eyes, far from the first time Loki had ever come to his aid, far from the first time Loki had thrown himself between Thor and danger. Only the most hopeless. The most doomed.

Always he sees Loki’s eyes in his dreams. Bloodshot, staring, frozen—or before that, the moment when his gaze flicked to Thor one last time, desperate, futile, while Thor’s last words to him still hung in the air, or seemed to. Those words had come so easily to his tongue, by habit, by frustration, by weariness.

He wants to blame Loki for it, to accuse him once more: it was because of him, because of these past years, that Thor had not believed his brother might truly die. He wants to be able to grasp Loki by the throat and shake him, because to him the idea had seemed distant, false, impossible. It was Loki’s own fault that the last thing he heard from Thor was disappointment.

When that thought fails, he tells himself that it doesn’t matter. That Loki knew him better than that. That surely Loki knew what Thor wishes he had said instead.

In the little pod on the way to Nidavellir, Thor sometimes stares out at the darkness, the distant glittering stars, feeling the vast emptiness and the quiet, remembering holding tight as they drifted in it. The taste of regret in the back of his throat, welling up from his useless lungs, no air to cry out or to make any sound at all in his grief.

When he sleeps, he dreams of holding his brother’s body.

And always he must wake to the knowledge that he let go.


End file.
